


Mirrors

by waxing_gibbous



Category: Silicon Valley (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-08
Updated: 2019-06-08
Packaged: 2020-04-12 13:07:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19132642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waxing_gibbous/pseuds/waxing_gibbous
Summary: There’s a behavior psychologists call mirroring: a matching of another person’s movements to signal an attraction, conscious or otherwise.





	Mirrors

**Author's Note:**

> Most of the time, I just want to make these two fuck. Tonight, however, I was feeling some FEELINGS about them...

The don’t do it consciously. 

They do it because they are in love with each other and they don’t know how to admit it yet.

It starts out accidentally, unthinkingly. They are fresh out of the shower, each at different times of the day. Jared in the early morning, Richard late at night. If you were to film them and put the footage side by side, the similarities of their movements would be remarkable. They stand in front of the mirror, towels around their waists. They de-fog the mirror with exacting sweeps of their palms. They frown at their appearances. Because their hair is wet, it looks different than it usually does. Jared’s hair looks wild and curly: a little bit like Richard’s. Richard’s hair looks flattened and sleek: a little bit like Jared’s. They both feel the same sharp, mutinous surge of affection, and then they both use their hands to return their hair to normal.

#

They need each other. This has long been established, and neither of them would go out of their way to claim otherwise. Jared shows his need openly: like a proud parent, or a worshipful child. Richard shows his need in small, jewel-like glimmers: a half-smile here, a millisecond of loaded eye contact there. The tether between them is steely and electric and obvious to anyone within a hundred feet of them. But to call it love? No, no. Not yet. Better to call it something else. Friendship, respect, mutual admiration. There’s a behavior psychologists call mirroring: a matching of another person’s movements to signal an attraction, conscious or otherwise. Jared’s mirroring of Richard is so cartoonishly blatant that it’s actually led to injury. Remember that concussion on the bunkbed? By contrast, Richard’s mirroring of Jared takes place when no one is looking. There are things, Richard has noticed, that Jared does with his hands. Delicate and particular things. Richard closes his eyes and tries to feel what it would feel like to feel with Jared’s fingertips. Alone in his bunkbed, fresh from his midnight shower, he copies what he imagines Jared’s fingers would do if faced with Jared’s own naked, clean body. He copies where he imagines Jared’s fingers would go. When he climaxes, he mirrors the ecstatic, stricken expression that might find itself on Jared’s face.

#

They both have dates on the exact same night. 

Jared’s date is a female version of Richard, and Richard’s date is a female version of Jared. They do not discuss this with each other, and they do not see each other get ready.

They do not know, therefore, that they have both accidentally dressed like each other.

Richard owns one pair of nice pants. They’re the bottom half of the suit that makes him look, in Erlich’s words, like a ventriloquist’s dummy. He pairs the pants with his least tattered button-down shirt, and then, on the way to the bar, he buys a camel-colored merino sweater for sixty percent off at Banana Republic. In the car, he tears the tags off the sweater and pulls it over his head. He pats down his hair. His reflection in the rearview mirror is both exhilarating and disappointing. He’s so close to something…but what? Who is he trying to be and who is he trying to impress? At the bar, the Jared-girl is already there waiting, hands clasped primly in front of her, dark hair tucked behind a large, pale ear. It’s common to all unusually tall people, he tells himself: that deferent slouch, that jutting neck. Still, it seems too specific tonight to be accidental, and he wonders where Jared is, who he’s with, what he looks like.

Jared looks like Richard. Or as much like Richard as physical constraints will allow. Jared has arrived at the restaurant several minutes early and is waiting at the table, worrying the frayed cuff of his hoodie. Where on earth did he acquire this hoodie? It has the name of a failed Hooli brand extension on it, so it must have been a discarded piece of corporate swag, a token of faux-appreciation from Gavin. The real mystery is why it is currently on his body. As he was getting ready, it practically leapt onto him of its own accord. The same is true of the jeans, which Jared hasn’t worn in three years and suddenly reappeared in his laundry pile as if by magic. The tousled hair, however, is on purpose. It took more than a little courage to defy convention, to mess up that perfect part and to run his hands through it without care as to where everything landed. He is very nervous about it, but when the Richard-girl walks through the door of the restaurant, he is pleased with his decision. Her curls are coarse, reddish, and wild and she is all decked out in classic tech-nerd casual: a faded black turtleneck, a denim skirt, and what appear to be decades-old hiking boots.

At the end of their dates, they each kiss their girls. No tongue. It is pleasant and polite, but no match for how they feel thirty minutes later when they return home and cross paths in the kitchen. 

“Jared?”

“Richard?”

Both of them give the same forced shrug, as if to deny the obvious. Jared unzips his hoodie and balls it in his hands. Richard removes his sweater and twists it into a rope. They both blush, and the heat of it is fierce. 

“Your night went well?”

“It did. Yours?”

“Mine went well. As…well.”

The thing about a mirror is that you can’t walk inside of it. You can’t crawl through it and live in the reflection you admire. For that, you’d need a window: a portal that can either separate or unite, depending on the weather. 

“It was a little bit chilly tonight. I wasn’t sure how to dress.”

“It sure is a conundrum, the Bay Area in the summer.”

Men with less of a connection would need to say more. Jokes, insults, excuses, declarations. But Richard and Jared’s conversation is already complete. They turn from each other with the same anxious duck of the head. They pause, back to back, in a moment of silent resolve, silent reluctance. And they return to their rooms wishing the walls of the house were like the walls in interrogation rooms. A mirror on one side, a window on the other. The one being watched blind to the one doing the watching. The watcher free to take as much time as he needs.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Illustration: Mirrors](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19291888) by [retrauxpunk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/retrauxpunk/pseuds/retrauxpunk)




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